Browse Items (868 total)

• Dissociation Sequences (C23H28O8)

  Brutal cello and electronics piece.
  
  Dissociation Sequences (C23H28O8) tells a narrative of being caught in the middle of a hallucination (or series of hallucinations) on Salvinorin A and the cognitive effects the chemical has on the brain. The hallucinations from Salvinorin A (from the salvia divinorum plant) cause various dissociative effects such as distortions of time, space, memory and motor function. In this piece the cellist is battling with these dissociations through the realization of the score and the interaction with the live electronics.
  
  This piece was written for James Burch and is dedicated to Franklin Cox.

• Distant Thunder

  For me Distant Thunder conjures up images of being in the desert while watching distant thunderstorms roll across the sky, accompanied by the unforgettable sweet smell of desert rain. These storms are particularly beautiful as the rain clouds build, break apart, and re-form, sending tendrils of rain down, most evaporating long before they touch the desert floor.

  I intended to use the sounds of a resonant floor furnace and various adhesive tapes slowly unrolling as the primary sound sources, but after recording the furnace, I boiled water for tea, and could not resist recording the sonic patterns that emerged. I did use the sound of the furnace, but the tape unrolling was used only to impart spatialization through convolution to other, more stationary sources.

• Dominant

• Don't Look Now

  Don’t Look Now for String Quartet and Electronic Sounds was commissioned by the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, who gave the world premier at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City on April 28, 1991.  The piece has since received numerous performances, including at the International Computer Music Conference in Montreal and the SEAMUS Conference in Urbana, Illinois, both in 1991.  It was subsequently performed throughout Europe and South America by the Smith Quartet, who made this recording at the Electroacoustic Music and Recording Studios of the Royal College of Music in London.
  
  Composers have long been fascinated by the “special effects” obtainable on traditional instruments, but have tended to use them sparingly, in part because many of them are very soft and/or difficult to control and produce reliably.  In this piece, I have used the electronic medium to amplify and extend some of the effects which can be produced on stringed instruments, such as col legno battuto, tremolando sul ponticello, snap pizzicato, left hand pizzicato, harmonic glissandi, etc.  In most cases, the effects are introduced first in the acoustic ensemble, then developed further in the electronic part.  Because of this, and also because the sounds on the tape are almost exclusively derived from recordings of real stringed instruments, it should not always be apparent to the listener whether a sound is coming from the quartet or from the speakers, and hence the title, Don’t Look Now.
  
  Many of the sounds in the electronic part were originally recorded by the cellist, Barry Sills, of Austin, Texas.  I then digitally processed these sounds at The University of Texas Electronic Music Studios in a variety of ways, using MIT’s CSound, Mark Dolson’s Phase Vocoder, and some of my own software.  The sounds were then loaded to Ensoniq EPS and Kurzweil K2000 samplers for real-time performance.

• Double Structure

  Live recording from Spaulding Auditorium at Dartmouth College, October 31 1971. A pre-cut wooden structure is assembled on stage with moving electronics by the two composers.

• Dr. Quisling in Stockholm

  Bregman Electronic Music Studio. A political piece in protest of the conditions for composers working at Elektronimusikstudion Stockholm and commissioned by the Swedish Radio.

• Dreaming in its Shadow

  ""To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall..."" Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
  
  Inspired by the collaboration with the commissioning flutist, this work incorporates elements from Franz Schubert’s ""Der Lindenbaum"", Deep Listening© movement practices and acoustic-ecology-inspired field recordings. The piccolo player must follow a series of choreographic steps and movements that correspond to the sounds and patterns of the fingerings as well as to the ways trees and forests are formed. This work invites the player to become part of the pre-recorded sounds and to inhabit the space in a way that embodies and sonifies the performer’s mythical transformation from human to tree. The work is designed to elicit memory, dreamtime and imagination to bring us closer to the elements of what make up the material of the instrument being played, and to remind of us of our dear old friends, trees."

• Dreams Unwind

  Dreams Unwind, for piano and live, interactive electronics was composed for pianist Keith Kirchoff as part of the 2016 SPLICE summer institute. This piece is a reflection on feelings of disillusionment, and how things may have diverged from the path we thought we were walking. Never really finding resolution, the piece walks the line between hopeful optimism and mocking contempt, leaving us with the feeling of looking towards an uncertain future.

• Drift

• Driftwood Box Puzzle

  Structured improvisatory musical figures with strictly notated sections create contrasting textures juxtaposed with one another.
  
  Driftwood Box Puzzle mixes structured improvisatory musical figures with strictly notated sections to create contrasting textures juxtaposed with one another. The resulting form of such interactions may be analogous to a labyrinthine kind of musical game in which the instruments and electronics wind around each other in order to find a “way out.”